


on the burning sand

by anonymousdaredevils



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Brainwashing, F/M, M/M, Multi, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sensory Deprivation, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 00:39:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4242900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousdaredevils/pseuds/anonymousdaredevils
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he woke up blind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> MIND THE TAGS. 
> 
> [ this prompt ](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=178645#cmt178645)

Foggy had been slumped over his laptop, stuck in the nightmare headache of unraveling Consolidated Global's financials in the desperate hope that they'd find _something_ admissible, when Karen called him into the lobby. 

She had the local news' broadcast from last night up on her laptop, and she'd gone white. The minute Foggy got within grabbing distance she grabbed, and without looking away from the screen she said "Foggy - that isn't _Matt_ , that can't be -"

" _What_ ," he said. Matt had been missing for five weeks, now. 

He shoved her out of her chair; she went without seeming to notice that he'd pushed her. There, on the little screen - last night they'd been so _angry_ , so exhausted by how completely Fisk had gotten the jump on them, that they hadn't had the stamina to watch more than a minute or two of the broadcast. Karen had gotten terrifyingly, quietly drunk, and she'd stumbled into a cab with Foggy, and they'd slept back to back on his bed, fully clothed, like children in the night. But here, and now, today, it - 

"It can't be, though," Foggy said. He felt numb. Behind Fisk - behind the woman who was with him - was a slim man standing at an angle to the camera; he appeared to be watching the reporter and whoever stood behind Fisk. His body language was nothing like Matt's; this man stood straight and aggressive. He was the only one not wearing a suit, and he was barefaced, and that was the detail that made Foggy feel sick. It _could_ be Matt's stupid fluffy hair, Matt's jawline - but it wasn't a lot to go on: hundreds of people looked like Matt. "Does he." He had to clear his throat; there were little black sparkles at the edge of his vision. "Does he look at the camera? Ever?" 

"No," Karen said; she was crushing Foggy's hand in hers. She wasn't blinking. "Not - Foggy, am I -" 

Her eyes were very bright. He didn't blame her; he felt like he was going to cry, too. 

"It's not Matt," Foggy told Karen - told himself, be honest, Nelson - because the man on camera looked like he was _watching_ Fisk's back, and that was the one thing that Matt would never do, for more than one reason. "I want -" clues, a lead, _something_ besides what they had, which was Matt simply not coming to work five weeks ago, and since then, apparently disappearing off the face of the earth. What they _had_ was Matt's phone, left in Matt's apartment, and the disturbing and nonsensical revelation that the lab guy Brett had sent over _had_ found blood in Matt's apartment, a surprising amount of it, in the couch and on the floor. More than one kind of blood. Old, though, way older than anyone would've expected. 

"You don't know that it's not him," Karen said. She didn't meet Foggy's eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

He woke up blind. 

Such a stupid thing to say, right, Murdock? because. Anyone would say that he'd been waking up blind for twenty years: it shouldn't have been anything new, it should've been a funny joke. but he woke up blind, absolutely no idea of where he was, except his hands were cuffed - to a bedframe? metal, maybe, hospital cot, thin mattress, he could feel the frame through it. police procedure? but he couldn't get an idea of where he was, he couldn't get an idea of the room, so when someone put their hand on his forehead he kicked up and out to what felt - warmest? warmest, trying to aim for center mass. 

Missed. 

No hands on his body anymore. 

Someone had put earplugs in his ears, which was when he had the first panic attack, honestly, because this meant that the whole night had gone so far sideways that he was screwed, screwed, screwed. 

Wanted to clench his teeth, he knew - he could feel warm patches, blurry sort of warm patches somewhere close enough for him to pick up distinct areas of heat, which could be people or could be fucking lightbulbs or stoves for all he knew, open sunny window maybe, nothing was moving enough for him to pin down. He opened his mouth (the muscles in his jaws were so tight they creaked), trying to - trying to get anything, anything he could, and. People, yeah, the general soap-and-piss-and-deodorant-and-sweat smells of them, smell of old paint, smell of dirt-and-oil from shoes, focus, matt, get more, go deeper, focus - 

\- which is why the fist in his hair blindsided him so hard he screamed in shock, but that wasn't the worst: oh, he was fucked, because someone smeared - Vicks? something strong, chemical, petroleum base, maybe? under his nose, every time he took a breath it was like getting shocked with the chemical burn of it, dizzyingly painful, he couldn't -

He rubbed it off once, twice, three times, but people keep coming back and putting it on, patiently, and Matt was disoriented and sick and couldn't smell, hear, taste anything, he was done, he was gone, he couldn't get further than his own body, so he finally just gave up and laid on his back, panting in pain, breathing through his mouth as much as possible although with that much menthol goo anywhere near his mucus membranes there was no escaping it. Kept flinching every minute or two because he was lying on his back and he wasn't wearing a shirt. Blood from the bad cut was trickling down his side, but he couldn't hear it. All he could hear is his own heartbeat, monstrously, comically loud, echoing in his head. 

Which was about the time he'd figured out that he wasn't wearing the mask anymore. He could hold it together - briefly, so briefly - by counting seconds in his head, counting in batches of sixty, thinking one two three four five six and letting each number bloom into all the space in his brain. Once he got it together for as long as ten minutes at once. 

He didn't know how long he spent lying there before someone touched him again. Long enough to feel dizzy, to start holding onto the burn of menthol and digging his nails into his palms for points to focus on. He couldn't remember being this - blind, actually blind - since the day or two he woke up after the accident. 

Pretty obvious why he curved into whoever's hand, though, just like any drowning man would grab onto a shark swimming by if they thought it would help: a hand, glove, latex, no fingerprints, he could feel that much, but warm, even though it was perilously close to the gash over his ribs. That should be reason enough to flinch away, but - but he couldn't see anything, and that idea had never felt so bitterly ironic before. One hand, one set of hands, human enough, warmer than his skin, and they were clearly not friendly but he didn't care, he wanted - it was a line to the world outside of his body, he wanted it, he was desperate for it, he - 

\- someone else put their hand under his chin, tried to push his jaw shut: he hadn't realized it'd been hanging open, that he'd been panting like an animal, trying to get - something, anything, trying to break through the cotton wool shutting him up in his own body, but when he felt that he tried to bite. 

He didn't make a hit, of course, and then the hands went away. Nobody touched him. Just Matt Murdock, blind, couldn't smell anything, couldn't hear anything, couldn't - 

the shaking was ridiculous because he'd been hurt worse than this before but he couldn't seem to make himself stop. had to clench his teeth around the noises that wanted to come out of his mouth. it was pathetic and he didn't know what to do. 

He didn't know how much longer it actually was before the hands came back again. a while, probably. That time he shut his own mouth, shaking, disgustingly desperate for something, some outside stimulus. Fighting wasn't something he could manage. At that point, he mostly just wanted it to be over: whatever else these assholes had planned, it had to be less - less horrifying than this. somebody had to make a mistake. 

The second time, though, someone's bare hands were on his face, prying at his jaw: he fought for a whole second before - no, no, he couldn't handle being left alone again, he needed to move this along while he still had focus to plan. He opened his mouth. 

Two or three blurry hot places close to him, probably. Man's hands on his face, big enough to span from cheekbone to jaw, the coarseness of the skin: nothing tasted like lotion or moisturizer, either, which probably meant man, probably meant - 

The man touching his face put two fingers in his open mouth. 

Oh. It felt oddly disconnected from Matt Murdock, who he was inside his head: felt like something that was happening while he paid attention to it, but not - to him, exactly. His own pulse was deafening. 

He didn't bite. It was close: partly because he was in that dizzy place where it no longer felt quite real. There were reasons, in the real world, why people would take his mask off and try to put their hands in his mouth, and he's seen some of those reasons, and he's heard some of them, and he knew what was most likely to happen, at this point. He couldn't stop hyperventilating, but he didn't feel afraid; it was very strange. He was taking dry shallow breaths through his nose, and he wasn't moving, and then as bad as everything else had been, it managed to get worse in about thirty seconds, counting slowly: the raw stimulus after nothing for so long was enough send some bizarre, terrible message to his dick. That was hard. It would be humiliating if he could calm down enough to be humiliated. That's a laugh: Matt hadn't been this legitimately fucking terrified and angry in twenty years, but also - not, quite, connected to his body. 

Whoever it was, they rubbed a thumb over his cheekbone, over and over, in a slow, easy rhythm. It's - pride was for people who die young, Stick used to say, and Matt was terrified and overwhelmed: he started timing his breath to that thumb. Gasped in air like he was jerking a rope in tug of war; the thumb stroked his cheekbone again and he let that one gasp out. After ten or twenty breaths, it started to feel like whoever was petting him was in fact slowing their strokes, trying to slow down his breathing pattern. 

It helped, when the pair of latex hands started stitching up his ribs.

 

***

He hadn't thought ahead to what would happen if they took the earplugs out, which is why he tried to scream, choked on it, and spent way too long fighting to get his hands up over his ears, it hurt, it hurt way more than he remembered from childhood, he felt like a raw nerve, it was too much all at once, there was no way - no way to handle this, he couldn't breathe. 

It was like putting his hand in a fire and holding it there, and nothing he'd ever done had prepared him for it. How could he have forgotten - gifts, stick had said, that was easy to say, when Matt could hear the clamoring uneven heartbeats of what sounded like a crowd of people right in front of him, dim like underwater sharks, a man's voice saying "fucking law -" and another man's voice much closer, interrupting, saying ? another man's voice saying "gotta piss," bored, angry, loud, loud, loud, LOUD, 

A woman's voice. "my voice, my voice, sweetheart, focus, please, listen to me," 

it brought him down eventually. 

better?" she asked. Which was funny, because the minute he said "better," he was sure whatever was next would start happening. he still didn't have a plan for what the fuck he was going to do then, except apparently scream a lot or panic, in other ways. it was probably going to be embarrassing for Foggy, at this point, to have to identify his corpse. 

"good," the woman said. definitely a woman. definitely wearing perfume. everything hurt to think about, everything hurt to process, he couldn't have broken anything down, it was all instinct and sense memory. "what's your na _EVER MIND, JINX_?"

it didn't even feel like laughing, it just felt like hiccups, the kind of coughs that bring up mucus and blood, but it sounded like laughing. she sighed, said: "the docto _R YOU COULD SHUT UP_ wanted to give you ice chips: they're going to be cold, don't spit them out _OF HERE_ ," and it was almost enough that he wanted to spit _TUESDAY MAYBE_ them out to spite her, but. he couldn't. that'd be too stupid, yet. 

"so?" she asked. he had his voice back. it came out shocking him: he sounded - like he hadn't spoken in days. 

"lose the cuffs," he said, and managed to shake one so it rang. Echoes: echoes were helpful. Was that a window? Maybe one window, definitely a door, no other bed in the room, a - a cabinet? fuck, he was dizzy, just from trying to scope out the room. 

"No one wants you to hu _R TITS, OH MY GOD_ yourself," which was just about as hilarious a thing as anyone had said to him in the last week or so, but Matt had no idea when they were going to really get started or put those (fucking) earplugs back in, so - a window? sun coming through it, warmer patch of wall on one wall, glass, but not quite right, it didn't - it didn't feel like glass, his luck if it was weird, bulletproof maybe: heavy fucking door, no vent to the room that he could hear: no air coming through the ceiling or the floor - 

"I'd really like to know what to call you," she said, again, and the echoes of her voice crystallized a few things, great, the room couldn't be soundproof, because he kept getting - flashes, bits and pieces of many different people talking, but the walls were too thick for him to sense through, here. Who had even caught him? This wasn't the Russians, the Russians were the ones who thought baseball bats to the knees were fucking creative - 

"James," he spat, "Ja _NUARY PROBABLY_ Dean, Elvis Presley, Mickey Mouse, fuck yourself," because as many words as he could get out, that was best - 

She slapped him, hard, a solid hit: it split his lip and knocked his head to the side, left him dizzy enough that he wanted to throw up. good. great. this. Blood made sense: blood helped him remember what to say and do, at times like these. 

"D'you have a boyfriend?" because it was important to get them mad, that's when mistakes got made: "you should probably let him handle the hitting, sweeth _EAR TO GOD I'M NOT KIDDING THOUGH, IT WAS UNBELIEVABLE_ -"

"You should start thinking lo _AUNDRY TODAY, ALWAYS TUESDAY_ instead of short-term," and she sounded calm and even, which was not what he'd been going for at all. "I'll give you a while, I guess." 

The only good thing about earplugs, really neat nifty medical-grade mutant-proof whatever the fuck this was, was that Matt couldn't hear what he actually said in the next few minutes. He didn't really want to think about any of that, didn't want to categorize what came out of his mouth as anything more than "noise," honestly, until the day he died. 

 

***

 

He had no idea how long they kept the earplugs in, that time. He knew that he absolutely lost it, started yanking at the cuffs on his wrists just to feel the pain, just to hold onto his sense of self. His wrists hurt when he tugged. He had wrists; they felt wet, he was pretty sure that he was bleeding but he couldn't smell it. He should be able to smell it. He couldn't. His throat felt raw, like he'd been screaming, but he couldn't hear the noise of it - was he screaming? Was he making any noise at all? 

Someone grabbed his hand. 

Earplugs came out again. 

That time, he could hear himself screaming. 

Someone else grabbed his other hand, held it tightly; he couldn't get his hands free so he squeezed hard, helplessly, trying to ride it out. He felt like he was drowning, that same overwhelming sense of biological panic that had hit whenever he'd wound up in water, and he clutched their hands like they'd save his life. 

Eventually, it got - less. 

Less in a fuzzy, disconnected kind of way: he'd either spent so long with so much adrenaline in his body that he'd done something to himself, or they'd drugged him. He didn't _care_ , was the thing: he could feel two hands - one big, much bigger than his own, connected to a slow and steady heartbeat - and one slim, strong, ring on that hand, probably a woman's, because there was the smell of the same perfume as before. He thought. Probably. 

He didn't care. He wanted to lie here and he wanted to breathe and he wanted to hear their heartbeats and know that he wasn't the only thing, only person in this room. He wanted the smell of his own blood - because there it was, he had cut his wrists - and he wanted the smell of his own sweat and he wanted _all of this_. He didn't want it to go away. 

"All right," a woman - probably the same woman said, very gently: "all right, then." 

"You've hurt yourself very badly," a man said, deep, slow voice, Matt liked the deep slow voice, it was easy to follow, soothing, and he squeezed harder at the big hand. 

These were the people who did this to me, he thought, they wanted to see me hurting, don't be _stupid_ , Matt - but he couldn't help but be stupid, it felt like putting up a front, saying defiant words, would take some quantity of energy that he couldn't drag up. He felt utterly empty, exhausted: he'd never hit this level before. 

"We're going to get you cleaned up," the woman said, calmly. 

He wasn't sure if he shook his head or not, but he knew - no, no, he didn't want that, he couldn't move, he wanted to stay here and - and sleep, what he wanted was to sleep, right now. 

They uncuffed him. He couldn't get to his feet on his own; the man - bigger than Matt, much bigger - had to lift him up, and then he couldn't _stand_ on his own. 

 

***

 

They hauled him into a shower: he flinched, at first, because every water drop felt like a touch on his skin and he expected too hot or too cold. That wasn't how this was going to go, though, and he realized the trick too late. 

Luke warm water, and gentle hands, and the woman said "Matt, can you stand on your own?" and that sent a gagging pulse of sheer terror through him because he hadn't, he hadn't told them his name. 

"That's _not my name_ ," he said. His voice sounded ruined and it hurt to talk. 

"It's what you asked Vanessa to call you," the man said. He was the one supporting Matt, and he was big, and steady, and even if Matt had been able to walk on his own there was no way he would've been able to get away from this man. 

"I didn't say that," Matt insisted; he was shaking and she was touching his wrists with the kind of gentle, delicate care that made it hard to take a breath. 

"You don't remember," she corrected, and that wasn't true, he hadn't - he would _remember_ saying something like that, it couldn't be - "you poor thing, these are very bad." 

 

***

 

"I wonder," the second man said. "I do wonder - sir? Ma'am? If I may?" and the other two people stop touching him completely, no, not good, it was a physical relief but he didn't _want_ to be left alone, it made him feel half-sick with anxiety. He knew enough - he had it together enough - to recognize that the relief he felt when the second man touched him was disgusting, and inappropriate, and probably going to get him killed, but he couldn't help it. He slumped against the tiled wall, putting almost his full weight on it. 

Two fingers. Precisely along his spine (your spine, he thought, crazily; your fucking spine, don't let him touch your spine) from the nape of his neck to his ass. Once. Twice. 

Oh no, god in heaven, it felt good: it was a _relief_ , to get a pattern, an expected pattern of something that felt good. And it - along his spine, where the skin was thin and fragile and eager, desperate for touch. Matt hit the tiled wall with a flat hand; he was hard again, he didn't know why, didn't know why this was happening, why his body had betrayed him so absolutely. 

"Stop that, Matt," the first man said. 

A direct order: it was very important to defy it. 

He groaned instead. Some time later he came; it hurt (or felt sharply, needlingly good, he wasn't sure?) and it didn't bring any relief, it didn't feel good, it just - sensation was beginning to lose any shade of pleasure or pain. It was all _more_. 

 

**

The big man put him in a bed, naked, and then they started to walk away, and Matt would never outlive this humiliation. It would follow him into _death_ , but - before he could put a hand over his own mouth, he said "no don't. go." 

There was a little pause. 

"Sir?" the other man said, soberly. "I'll stay with him, don't worry." 

"Thank you, Wesley," the big man said. 

 

***

 

He woke up feeling ground up and run over. That was something he was used to; he wasn't used to the hypersensitive, shuddery feeling of his skin. Every tiny move he made scraped cotton sheets against his skin, and he was _naked_ , and. 

There was another man in the room with him. 

There were no windows in the room. 

Nothing that could be used as a weapon - although his wrists were badly cut, he didn't think he'd severed anything important but they felt puffy and swollen, like it would be difficult to hit hard enough to do the kind of damage he needed. 

The man had a gun and a - phone? 

If Matt could get the gun, he could shoot the man. Wait here until someone came to unlock the door, shoot whoever came through until he ran out of bullets. 

(Shoot himself, maybe, it came to that.)

"I wouldn't try it," the man said. "Matt." 

His voice was faintly mocking and it didn't matter, it still hit him like a physical blow, how shockingly good it was to hear something. No, he told himself: shut that thought up, put it away, he officially did not give himself permission to think of things like that any more. 

"That's not my name," Matt said, and coughed; there was blood in his throat, and he must've bitten his cheeks, because now he could taste the blood from the bites. "Come over here and say that again," he said, because he was naked, and clearly disoriented, and so there was a chance - just the slightest chance - that the man with the phone and the gun would want to gloat. 

Matt was pretty sure that if he kicked him in the throat - or punched him in the throat - hard enough to shut him up, he could buy himself a minute or two, long enough to get the gun and - and he'd figure out what to do then.


End file.
